Changing South Is at Intersection of Demographics and Politics

The South is the fastest-growing region of the country, and Democrats are hoping that a flood of Northern expats and demographic change will allow them to turn red states to blue at a fast enough pace to counter the region’s growing share of the Electoral College.

Democrats have already made big gains in some Southern states, like Virginia and Florida. But Republicans have held firm or even made gains of their own in other states, including Texas, a state where demographic and migration trends seem as if they should be helpful to Democrats.

The explanation for the varied pace of Democratic gains in the South, along with the transformation of Dixie more generally, is illustrated with census data compiled by my colleague Rob Gebeloff for The Upshot’s project on migration.

The data shows that the scope and sources of population growth vary considerably across the South. The migrants moving to Tennessee and Texas bear little resemblance to those moving to Virginia or Florida, and Democrats will struggle to make similar gains so long as that’s the case.

In 1900, the South was an impoverished backwater, and that wasn’t lost on the era’s migrants. People in the Northeast moved west, to the Great Lakes or Pacific Coast. Immigrants followed the same path. Ninety-five percent of Southerners were born in the South.

None of that is true today. The gap between the South and the rest of the country has closed, and the region’s population is booming. The Southern-born share of Southern residents has declined as a result, but the pace of change is uneven across the region. In Florida, people born outside the South represent a majority of the population, but in low-growth and more rural states like Mississippi and Louisiana, 90 percent of the population remains Southern-born.

The relative contributions of immigration and domestic migration, the two drivers of the decline in the Southern-born share of the Southern population, also vary across the region.

Domestic migration plays a larger role in the Mid-Atlantic States, while foreign-born residents have become nearly one-fifth of the population in Texas. Florida leads the way in both types of migration.

The relatively small contribution of domestic migration to Texas’ population growth is part of why the significant decline in the state’s Southern-born population hasn’t brought Democratic gains like those in Virginia or Florida. These foreign-born residents are generally Democratic, but they’re disproportionately ineligible to vote. Just 43 percent of foreign-born residents (and only 32 percent of those from Latin America) are naturalized citizens.

The somewhat lower contribution of domestic migration means that the native-born population in Texas is likelier to be born in the South than are their counterparts in other fast-growing states like Florida, where Democrats have made their biggest gains. Indeed, people born in the South still represent at least 80 percent of native-born residents in every Southern state except Virginia, Florida and the Carolinas.

The larger share of native-born Texans born in the South is somewhat at odds with the conventional wisdom of the state’s explosive population growth. The story line of Sun Belt growth doesn’t usually make big distinctions between the types of migration to different states and, to the extent that it does, it usually holds that Texas’ growth is driven by an exodus of migrants fleeing high home prices and high taxes in the Northeast and California.

There are certainly northeastern and West Coast expats in Texas: 1.6 million of them, in fact, including more than 600,000 from California. But although those numbers may seem impressive, they’re relatively low compared to the state’s population. The pace of migration is also low in comparison with the states along the Atlantic, which are proving to be more appealing destinations for coastal migrants. There are three times as many northeastern or Californian expats in Florida as there are in Texas; there are nearly as many in Virginia as there are in the far larger state of Texas.

The difference is particularly pronounced among Northeasterners: There are four times as many Northeastern expats in Florida as there are in Texas; there are more Northeastern expats in Virginia and North Carolina than in Texas; and there are nearly as many Northeastern expats in Georgia, at 816,729, as there are in Texas, at 929,692.

But in Texas, population growth is propelled by high in-state birthrates, a growing foreign-born population and domestic migration from just about everywhere in the country except the heavily Democratic Northeast, including elsewhere in the South. That makes Texas much more like Alabama or Tennessee than Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, which are the only three Southern states where there’s more migration from the Northeast and West Coast than from elsewhere in Dixie.

The proportion of native-born residents from the South versus the Northeast and California roughly parallels President Obama’s share of the white vote in 2012, which was lowest in states like Mississippi and Louisiana and as high as the mid-30s in Virginia and Florida. Those tallies are good enough for victory in states where nonwhite voters make an above-average contribution to Democratic tallies, as is the case across most of the South.

Democrats were able to become competitive so quickly in states like Virginia and North Carolina because they combined a growing nonwhite share of the electorate with gains among white voters, particularly in postindustrial metropolitan areas full of Northern expats. Without additional gains among white voters, Democrats will be forced to wait a long time for the children of foreign-born residents to carry them to competitiveness in Texas, a state that Mr. Obama lost by 17 points in 2012, and where there isn’t a flood of Democratic-leaning voters from New York to bail them out.